"Native
Language in a Contemporary World: Threats and Challenges for
Youths"

December 1, 2017

Geneva

Good afternoon,

My name is Enghebatu
Togochog. I represent the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center
based in New York.

As you all know Southern
Mongolia is always known as “Inner Mongolia” due to the direct translation of
the highly Sinocentric term “nei meng gu”.

I was born and raised in
Southern Mongolia, and my mother tongue is Mongolian. I received my education in
Mongolian from my elementary school to college where I majored in Mongolian
language and literature thanks to China’s brief relaxation on the control over
Mongolian language education.

From linguistic
perspective, Mongolian language belongs to the Altaic Language Family, and is
very close to Turkic languages including Uyghur and Turkish as well as
Manchu-Tungus languages. Mongolian language has no relationship whatsoever with
Chinese language which in fact is a member of Sino-Tibetan language family that
is completely different from Altaic Language Family.

Despite these, the Chinese
authorities have pushed hard to promote the language assimilation as part of
their broader assimilation policies toward Southern Mongolia.

During and after the
Chinese Cultural Revolution from the 1960s to 1970s, Mongolian language
education was completely banned across Southern Mongolia.

Starting the late 1970s,
after the large-scale genocide and ethnic cleansing in Southern Mongolia, the
Chinese regime somehow felt some satisfaction and confidence with their colonial
policies, and showed some relaxation on the control over Mongolian language
education in the region at the least on the surface. Some Mongolian schools were
reopened, and Mongolian Language Departments of some of the colleges were
allowed to become a separate department from the Chinese language departments.

In fact, the Chinese
constitution and other related laws and regulations always state to guarantee
the minorities’ right to “use and develop” their respective languages. However,
the reality is quite different and is becoming increasingly troublesome in
recent decades.

Some studies conducted by
long-term dissidents reveal that for 210,000 Mongolian inhabitants of the
regional capital, Hohhot, there are only 2 Mongolian elementary schools and the
number of children enrolled are fewer than 3,000, making up barely 1 percent of
the total Mongolian population of the city.

In the so-called “Inner
Mongolia Autonomous Region” alone, number of enrollees at Mongolian elementary
schools dropped from 110,000 in 1980 to 19,000 in 2009. This means the Mongolian
elementary school enrollment dropped by an alarming rate of 83% in 19 years.

The main reasons for this
sharp decline of the Mongolian student enrollment are:

Chinese
government policies including large-scale population transfer, elimination
of Mongolian schools at rural level and merger of Mongolian schools to
Chinese schools as part of the “ecological migration” and “quick
urbanization” programs;

It is due to the de facto second-class
citizen status of the Mongolians in the colonial state. Although the
Mongolian language is stated to be one of the official languages in Southern
Mongolia, the Chinese Government has made no effort whatsoever to make it
reality.

Mongolian students who studied Mongolian
language but are not in fluent in Chinese do not have any opportunity for
employment and career opportunity;

In some cases, Chinese employers including
some government agencies clearly stated in their employment requirement that
“no candidate educated in Mongolian is considered”;

We have learned some cases
in which Mongolian parents of eastern Southern Mongolia’s Ulaanhad municipality
published open letters on social media and demonstrated outside government
offices to protest the appointment of Chinese principals to the only two
kindergartens in the city that provide instruction in the Mongolian language.

The administrations of the
two schools restricted the use of the Mongolian language, and at least one of
the two schools banned Mongolian teachers from speaking Mongolian in the office.

In addition to these
restriction, another tragedy faced by the Southern Mongolians is the
computerization of Mongolian written language. The cause of this tragedy is due
to the Chinese authorities’ divide and conquer modus operandi to intentionally
create confusion and division among Mongolian linguists and eventually to make
the Mongolian language computerization system a defunct one.

The traditional Mongolian
writing system was adopted from the Uyghurs about a thousand years ago, is the
only true vertical alphabetic script in the world.

Today, traditional
Mongolian written system is one of the very few written systems that are not
fully computerized even though it was given enough slots in Unicode for its
alphabets thanks to the fairness of Unicode system. During the Mongolian
language Unicode adoption process, Chinese authorities hand-picked some of the
pro-regime so-called “linguists” and “scholars” or “experts” to fill up precious
Unicode slots allocated to Mongolian written language with nonsense, dead and
extinct symbols and letters, making our live written system a dysfunctional one
in any standard computer systems.

In this digital era, our
written language is not searchable in any major search engines such as Google
and Yahoo; our written language cannot go through any mailing systems such as
Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook so on; we are unable to use any text editor to write
Mongolian directly. Microsoft Office and any other major editors are not
available to Mongolian written system; no social media tools including WeChat
are available for Mongolian language due to the defunct Unicode system.

Mongolian children and
youth are effectively barred from learning their language and communicating with
their peers using their mother tongue. Due to the key principles of Unicode that
is “stability”, there is no way for us to fix this dysfunctional Mongolian
written system in Unicode domain.

In this sense, this
Chinese Government’s so-called “project for computerization of Mongolian
language in Unicode” is another round of genocide, a linguistic genocide,
specifically directed to wipe out the entire Mongolian language system.